The rapid appearance into the blood of essential amino acids, and leucine in particular, may act as an important signal to stimulate muscle protein synthesis after resistance exercise. This may explain why consuming rapidly-absorbed whey protein may have an anabolic edge over slowly-absorbed proteins such as casein. Previous investigations into importance of the rate of absorption to muscle protein synthesis that have used 'fast' and 'slow' proteins have been confounded by differences in amino acid composition. The present study addresses this issue by administering the same protein source, whey, as either a bolus or in small divided 'pulse' doses to achieve divergent amino acid profiles after a bout of resistance exercise.